Rain Box

Packaging

Consume

Sculpture

Veg Box

Painted bronze

Painted Bronze

Pistoletto's Matchbox 

Digital print on mirror polished stainless steel

Fire

Waste

Photographic Work

GAVIN TURK’S BIN BAG MOTIF WAS ORIGINALLY CREATED IN THE LATE 90S FOLLOWING ON FROM A SERIES OF WORK, WHERE FILLED BIN BAGS WERE CAST IN BRONZE AND PAINTED TO LOOK REAL, IMMEDIATELY ENGAGING WITH THEMES OF VALUE AND AUTHENTICITY. TURK NOW OFFERS THE OVERLOOKED AND DISCARDED, AS PROVOCATIVELY CONTEMPORARY PROPOSALS. PRESENTED HERE AS SINGLE PANELS OR DIPTYCHS, REMINISCENT OF MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO'S MIRROR WORKS.

Green and Pink with Rubbish Bag

Acrylic paint and diamond dust on canvas

Rubbish

Silkscreen

GAVIN TURK’S BIN BAG MOTIF WAS ORIGINALLY CREATED IN THE LATE 90S FOLLOWING ON FROM A SERIES OF WORK, WHERE FILLED BIN BAGS WERE CAST IN BRONZE AND PAINTED TO LOOK REAL, IMMEDIATELY ENGAGING WITH THEMES OF VALUE AND AUTHENTICITY. TURK NOW OFFERS THE OVERLOOKED AND DISCARDED, AS PROVOCATIVELY CONTEMPORARY PROPOSALS. PRESENTED HERE AS SINGLE PANELS OR DIPTYCHS, REMINISCENT OF MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO'S MIRROR WORKS.

White Castellani Box 

Pigment and acrylic medium on cardboard

Eggs

Painting

Klein Blue Box

Pigment paint on cardboard

Fragile Box

Castellani Box

Tulips

Painted bronze on oak and laminate plinth.

Yves Klein Blue Box

Unique un-numbered series of 8 Styrofoam Box

Butter Box

Unique un-numbered series of 8Styrofoam Box

Unique un-numbered series of 8 Styrofoam Box

Enrico Castellani Box

A bronze cast of a cardboard box with a partially open top, painted to look real.

Yard Box

Veggie Box

Trompe L'oeil

American Bag

Bin Bags

Geometric Surface

Recycled egg tray

American Box

In the early 1960s, Michelangelo Pistoletto made his first mirror paintings. They weren’t really mirrors, as they were done on large sheets of polished steel, and they weren’t really paintings, because the ‘floating’ figures they depicted were photographs printed on tissue (and later silk screens) applied to the metal surfaces. What they were – and still are – was platforms which spectacularly embodied the world (and all its artifice) through their reflection. The same could be said for Gavin Turk;  who not only appropriates historical artists’ works, but their entire mythologies, for his own-brand celebrity, refracting art world legends – such as Pistoletto’s mirror paintings – for democratized progress and use.  Substituting Pistoletto’s casually posed models with his own trademark bin bag – a punk-ethos anti-logo Turk’s previously reproduced in prints and stickers, monumentalised in trompe l’œuil bronze sculptures – Turk literally overlays Pistoletto’s legacy with his own. Maths being a favoured systematology in Arte Povera’s metaphysical quest, Turk revitalizes and trumps Pistoletto’s epitomized art/life merger with the end-game logic of +1. Mirror + bin bag, Pistoletto + Turk = art’s tautological lineage, performative re-enactment, and a certain Darwinian progress of artistic ego. But most importantly +1, by its very essence, is infinite.For Pistoletto, his ‘paintings’ functioned something like real-time theatre: his static figures wittily claiming the reflected gallery space as a stage, and viewers as veritas subjects; his mirrors less objects than mystical portals to a parallel present. Humorously titled Pistoletto’s (Rubbish/Waste/Bag), Turk’s tributes reflect the now as a bridge between past and future – as both consequence and prescience – transposing the gallery to a scene of hyper-consumerist apocalypse, where garbage becomes elevated to masterpiece in the hallowed white cube, and artworks and viewers luxuriantly bask in their own expenditure. Turk’s bin bag motif was originally created in the late 1990s as part of a series of work engaging with themes of homelessness. Transferred to Pistoletto’s visionary 1960s framework – heavy mirror and inky decal today seem a quaintly Luddite attempt at virtuality – Turk offers the overlooked and discarded, redundant and obsolete, as provocatively contemporary proposals. Presented as a single panel, Pistoletto’s Rubbish (2013), simulates the format of an altarpiece: a site of reverence, of stark confrontation, of our cultural values, fetishizations, desires, and excesses; of the world – featuring ourselves, via brand-Turk, as transients in the spectacle.

Pistoletto's Rubbish

Screenprint on mirror finish stainless steel

In the early 1960s, Michelangelo Pistoletto made his first mirror paintings. They weren’t really mirrors, as they were done on large sheets of polished steel, and they weren’t really paintings, because the ‘floating’ figures they depicted were photographs printed on tissue (and later silk screens) applied to the metal surfaces. What they were – and still are – was platforms which spectacularly embodied the world (and all its artifice) through their reflection. The same could be said for Gavin Turk; who not only appropriates historical artists’ works, but their entire mythologies, for his own-brand celebrity, refracting art world legends – such as Pistoletto’s mirror paintings – for democratized progress and use. Substituting Pistoletto’s casually posed models with his own trademark bin bag – a punk-ethos anti-logo Turk’s previously reproduced in prints and stickers, monumentalised in trompe l’œuil bronze sculptures – Turk literally overlays Pistoletto’s legacy with his own. Maths being a favoured systematology in Arte Povera’s metaphysical quest, Turk revitalizes and trumps Pistoletto’s epitomized art/life merger with the end-game logic of +1. Mirror + bin bag, Pistoletto + Turk = art’s tautological lineage, performative re-enactment, and a certain Darwinian progress of artistic ego. But most importantly +1, by its very essence, is infinite.For Pistoletto, his ‘paintings’ functioned something like real-time theatre: his static figures wittily claiming the reflected gallery space as a stage, and viewers as veritas subjects; his mirrors less objects than mystical portals to a parallel present. Humorously titled Pistoletto’s (Rubbish/Waste/Bag), Turk’s tributes reflect the now as a bridge between past and future – as both consequence and prescience – transposing the gallery to a scene of hyper-consumerist apocalypse, where garbage becomes elevated to masterpiece in the hallowed white cube, and artworks and viewers luxuriantly bask in their own expenditure. Turk’s bin bag motif was originally created in the late 1990s as part of a series of work engaging with themes of homelessness. Transferred to Pistoletto’s visionary 1960s framework – heavy mirror and inky decal today seem a quaintly Luddite attempt at virtuality – Turk offers the overlooked and discarded, redundant and obsolete, as provocatively contemporary proposals. Presented as a single panel, Pistoletto’s Rubbish (2013), simulates the format of an altarpiece: a site of reverence, of stark confrontation, of our cultural values, fetishizations, desires, and excesses; of the world – featuring ourselves, via brand-Turk, as transients in the spectacle.

Mirrors

In the early 1960s, Michelangelo Pistoletto made his first mirror paintings. They weren’t really mirrors, as they were done on large sheets of polished steel, and they weren’t really paintings, because the ‘floating’ figures they depicted were photographs printed on tissue (and later silk screens) applied to the metal surfaces. What they were – and still are – was platforms which spectacularly embodied the world (and all its artifice) through their reflection.

Flea Match Box

Found match box and elastic band

Turkey Foil Box x 4

Silkscreen ink on Plywood

Food

Self-Portrait

Turk Foil

Acrylic silkscreen on paper

Turkey Foil Box

Trash

Created in 2004, Tip exemplifies Gavin Turk’s ongoing investigation into authenticity within the art object. Using bronze, the material of Classical Greek sculpture, Turk has cast a rubbish bin bag seemingly stuffed full of unrecyclable matter. Made to look more real than reality, Tip is a true trompe l’oeil, an artistic technique that creates the illusion of space to challenge the divide between art and life. As Turk explains, ‘I am busy making things that are obviously not what they are’ in order to question what belongs within the gallery space (G. Turk quoted in D. Leader, ‘Gavin Turk: the analyst will unmask you now’, The Guardian, November 16, 2016). Illusion lets the artist comment on production, identity and capitalist structures, and he uses waste to critique consumption patterns, believing that what one discards is as insightful as what one keeps; detritus, for Turk, is a person’s anti-portrait and another way of staging the self. Turk was part of the Young British Artists who inaugurated a new era of British art in the 1990s, and he was included in Sensation, the provocative survey exhibition of YBA art held at the Royal Academy, London. 

Created in 2004, Tip exemplifies Gavin Turk’s ongoing investigation into authenticity within the art object. Using bronze, the material of Classical Greek sculpture, Turk has cast a rubbish bin bag seemingly stuffed full of unrecyclable matter. Made to look more real than reality, Tip is a true trompe l’oeil, an artistic technique that creates the illusion of space to challenge the divide between art and life. As Turk explains, ‘I am busy making things that are obviously not what they are’ in order to question what belongs within the gallery space (G. Turk quoted in D.

A bronze cast of a full black bin bag painted to look real.A bag full of discarded products, unrecycled organic matter thrown in with the by-products of our wasteful consumerist lifestyles. This rubbish is encapsulated in the formal roundness of this classic trompe l’œuil artwork. We are defined by what we throw away and conversely we are deconstructed by what we choose to display in our hallowed museum halls.

Bag (10)